If I Come Back, You’ll Still Be Here: Car Seat Headrest’s How to Leave Town a Decade Later

It has now been 10 years since Will Toledo yelled “It is 2014, and I have no idea what is going on in my life” on his self-released EP (or, really, album), How to Leave Town. 11 months later, he was signed to beloved indie label Matador Records. One year after that, under the familiar appellation of Car Seat Headrest (he already had eleven albums out under that name on Bandcamp), he released an album of re-recorded songs and called it Teens of Style. In 2016, his first label-released record of entirely new songs, Teens of Denial, sky-rocketed him straight into the echelons of the modern indie rock zeitgeist. But the Will Toledo captured on How To Leave Town doesn’t know any of that yet, and, crucially, that version of him never will.

2014 Will Toledo remains alive within and because of How to Leave Town: still frozen in the midst of his cross-country, post-graduation road trip, stuck in an eternal limbo between Virginia and Seattle, college and adult life, a relationship and its end, his Bandcamp days and the onset of mainstream success. He just graduated college and decided to move to Seattle because of its more active music scene, but everything else was largely uncertain—and in that moment of sheer uncertainty, How to Leave Town was born. We know what is to come, now: Car Seat Headrest becomes a critical indie darling, its moniker plastered onto many college dorm room walls (mine included). Perhaps that’s why How to Leave Town feels so strange to look back at from our vantage point of the present—it feels like staring at a photo of Schrödinger’s closed box, years before it was opened and the cat inside was found alive and well. Like being grabbed at the neck and pulled back in time, into the midst of a sea of questions, the answers we now know forcibly forgotten.

But it’s not just the gap between Toledo’s past and our present that makes How to Leave Town so striking to look back on; rather, it’s the fact that the EP itself is painfully aware of and utterly preoccupied by its placement within that gap. The album’s speaker is stuck in perpetual motion, unable to go back nor to reach his destination, constantly stuck in-between, leaving the future trapped in a Schrödinger’s box he’ll never get to open—and somehow, he seems to know it.

How to Leave Town isn’t my personal favorite Car Seat Headrest album; I, like many others, am partial to Twin Fantasy (though some of my most beloved tracks are off of Teens of Denial and Monomania). But it is, perhaps, How to Leave Town that I’ve come back to the most, that I spent nearly all of my teenage years cohabitating with. I can’t count how many times I’ve stood in a field or on a fire escape and held the tinny early iPhone sound of “Kimochi Warui” up to my ear, or how many miserable drives I’ve spent numbly staring out the window with the low palpitations of “The Ending of Dramamine” thudding dully in the back of my head, or how many anxious nights I’ve spiraled into existential dread alongside “America (Never Been).” And in those moments stuck in that terrifying limbo, watching the airtight walls of the Schrödinger’s box of my own creation closing in, it was How to Leave Town that I turned to. Without fail.

The record viscerally evokes this strange, borderline surreal sensation of finding oneself on some endless, purposeless road-trip where the highways are always empty, the landscape is all dust, it never stops being nighttime and you can’t seem to find a reason to stop driving, even though it feels like you don’t really have a reason to drive in the first place. It’s a very specific feeling, but it’s one that, admittedly, has long been prominent in at least my life, impossible to verbalize yet strong enough to grip my gut like a vice. For me, the only other media that comes close to evoking that particular form of restlessness, at once stock-still and desperate for movement, is Don Hertzfeldt’s 2012 film It’s Such a Beautiful Day, in a scene that has reminded me of How to Leave Town (and vice versa) for years. “He’s driving a car,” a disembodied voice narrates, “and every time he realizes he’s driving a car he figures he should just keep driving the car… He has no more directions to follow—he fills the car with gas again and again. He keeps going into the night—he wants to keep going, he wants to go forever.” By the end, each line overlaps with the last, the language turning into a propulsive, meaningless mantra.

How to Leave Town begins similarly, although the tenor of its propulsive motion is more numb than frantic: The first five minutes of the phenomenal 14-minute opener, “The Ending of Dramamine,” are dedicated to sparse drums and droning synth, grounding the track in a disconcerting yet steady pulse that builds on itself as the song grinds on. There’s a tiredness to it, but there’s also this feeling of certainty, this methodical press onwards; it’s no less propulsive for the sense of resignation that underlies it. After a burst of intense, organ-like instrumentation (and a following burst of near-silence, save for some lingering reverb), Toledo’s voice finally breaks through, distant and cold: The friend of a drunk driver “falls under the wheels,” he half-sings, half-mutters, “but the headlights don’t flinch and the engine doesn’t stutter,” and the car keeps on driving without looking back. (And we’re back to the cat and the box again—if the driver keeps driving, the friend remains equally dead and alive, and the weight of truth can be avoided; it’s Schrodinger’s DUI).

The track’s title references “Dramamine” by Modest Mouse (a band similarly affectionate towards miserable road trip tunes), the ending of which apparently scared Toledo’s friend, Naked Days frontman Degnan Smith. “The Ending of Dramamine,” according to Toledo, was primarily written by stringing together unused lines that he cut from other songs—and yet, it somehow feels completely cohesive. This is also the case for How to Leave Town at large: The album is made up of tracks originally written for the album that eventually became Teens of Denial, but ended up on the cutting room floor due to not quite fitting into Toledo’s sonic and conceptual vision for the future release. Even so, it manages to feel as tight and carefully constructed as—if not even more so than—many modern albums written as intended, from beginning to end.

The record begins in a car and ends that way too, seemingly no closer to a destination (at least, a physical destination) than it was at the start. The fourth track, “I-94 W (832 mi),” is a minute-and-a-half of pure instrumentation, guitar riffs fading in and out of each other with the same zip as speeding past street lights on a highway. It’s a pensive encapsulation of that sense of isolation on the road, nocturnal and surreal, staring out the window and watching the white paint of the road marking blur into one line. The only other short song on the record, the penultimate track “Is This Dust Really From the Titanic?,” seems to abstractly take place in a car as well, as one line of the second bridge lists out a series of items that, ostensibly, can be found in the speaker’s car: “Loose Ibuprofen capsules / Shorthand directions to Elmhurst, Minneapolis, Bozeman, Tiger Mountain / Great Clips receipt with a coupon attached.” (It’s a little bit like an unironic version of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping’s joke track “Things In My Jeep,” a comparison I intend as a compliment, because I have always unironically loved that song.)

The sprawling 11-minute closing track, “Hey, Space Cadet (Beast Monster Thing in Space),” begins with a similar process of cataloging, but of the sights of the road-trip itself rather than within the car undergoing it: “Frozen margaritas in Austin / Hi, How Are You Daniel Johnston / Just a day’s drive away from Memphis / Taking care of business with Elvis.” The last indicator we get of the speaker’s physical location in the album is the vague melancholia of the next verse, “And I’m so far away from home / Last night I dreamed I had returned / To the land of all my favorite highways / (Route Seven).” As such, the album ends with Toledo still in transit, still “so far away from [his] home” of Leesburg, Virginia, yet nowhere near his destination of Seattle (and apparently somewhere near Austin and Memphis instead? To be frank, I am very confused by the literal trajectory of this road-trip, but I can’t fault the man for making music-history-inclined pit stops!). Oddly enough, the closest the album gets to Seattle is in the very first song, with a reference to a desolate deserted Montana rest spot. While the emotional arc of How to Leave Town is relatively linear, at least in the big picture, the physical movements of it are anything but; the only consistent truth of the road trip from song to song is that it is ongoing, in a perpetually liminal state of suspension, caught in some odd temporal and spatial limbo between here and there (and sometimes both at once).

But I would be remiss to talk about the cross-country journey driving the album (pun somewhat intended) without drawing attention to “America (Never Been),” which I’ve always mentally placed alongside Springsteen’s “Born to Run” when thinking about Essential American Road Trip songs. But where “Born to Run” is a restless fantasy of escape and yearning for that unruly salvation, “America” takes place on the road itself—and finds itself still yearning. At the start of the track, in its first minute of somber contemplation, a classic rock ‘n’ roll count-off whips the remainder of the song into a rollicking dance track as Toledo sings, at once wistful and disillusioned, about the classic American fantasy of “driv[ing]” across the entire country—but even the concept leaves something to be desired, the grandeur of the idea shot through with the fact that you could, potentially, drive coast to coast in just “four days, if you really wanted.” Instead of feeling freer at the notion of leaving everything behind, Toledo just finds more ways to shackle himself to guilt, imagining “leaving custom thank you notes / in all the houses you ever haunted.”

It doesn’t matter if you take to the highway and rev the engine as hard as you can, if you get a “boy/girlfriend,” if “your face is on every dollar”—your problems still don’t end. Toledo cries out, almost sarcastic with frustration, “Is this your salvation plan? / Is this your salvation plan?” He self-flagellates himself for having the gall to be sad: “Real life’s a mess / But at least you’re not paying rent / You’ve been making it, maybe even breaking even / You oughta be content / It doesn’t make sense.” It’s a little bit of a precursor to Teens of Denial’s “Fill in the Blank,” which spends a solid two-thirds of its length berating its speaker for the sheer audacity of his depression. “Fill in the Blank,” however, concludes with a final chorus that pushes back against that line of self-loathing—”I’ve got a right to be depressed,” Toledo sings, insisting that he’s tried to fight it, that he has seen a lot of the world, that it still hurts anyways. “America” has no such change of heart. As depressing as the conclusion to “Fill in the Blank” might sound, there’s this sense of vindication, of defiant self-acceptance, that largely eludes the bulk of How to Leave Town. Instead, “America” ends with Toledo yelling out crazed affirmations about America itself, equal parts cruel sarcasm and manic desperation, all of which get almost entirely drowned out by distortion and sound: “Bright lights! Living in the city! / This is life! This is your life! / America! / This is heaven!”

The emphasis placed on “This is your life!” feels particularly crucial, given how much of the album is concerned with the possibility of a discrepancy between merely being alive and actually living—and as someone who has spent much of their own life similarly preoccupied, “America (Never Been)” has always felt particularly piercing, even at its danciest. There’s only “one type of life,” in Toledo’s mind: “It’s the living kind of life / And it’s not one I recognize.” In one of my favorite verses off the entire record, Toledo comes face-to-face with the devastating reality of the matter, before rapidly swerving away: “You can spend every living moment thinking / How can I get alive? / But is it really then- Can you really call it- / Hey man, just shut up and drive.” These four lines feel so much like a spiritual successor to Robert Creeley’s famous poem, “I Know a Man,” that I’ve often wondered if Toledo (an English major himself!) possibly intended to make the connection. In the poem, an unnamed driver says to a friend, “the darkness sur- /-rounds us, what / can we do against / it, or else, shall we & / why not, buy a goddamn big car,” before being suddenly cut off with “drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going.” (It is important to note that who, exactly, says those final three lines remains ambiguous and oft-debated—the friend or the driver?)

It’s the exact same structure: mid-drive, a man gets suddenly possessed by existential dread and starts frantically wondering if he should be doing something to start living more, before getting interrupted and told to focus on the road instead. But Toledo’s verse cuts out the ambiguous involvement of the friend, choosing to omit any mentions of subjects entirely, which means the “interruption” is more easily attributed to the original speaker—this grants it something of a double life anyways, even as it cuts the speaker possibilities in half. What I’ve always found so fascinating about this moment in“America” is that this interruption can be read as both an act of cowardice and an act of bravery, a refusal to confront the truth and an attempt to live better because of it. Obviously, the word that Toledo cuts himself off before giving voice to is likely “living”—a life spent consumed with the fear of not living enough is just a life consumed. A life wasted. A self-fulfilling prophecy. In this reading, it’s no wonder the line goes unfinished, as even the utterance of that question borders on confirmation of a worst fear—and it’s easier to keep the box closed, allowing hope to remain alive even if that means it simultaneously remains dead, than wrenching it open to discover the truth once and for all. But on the other hand, the act of asking the question is itself a perpetuation of the same issue; so stop thinking about it. Shut up and drive. Shut up and live. And for Christ’s sake, look where you’re going.

How to Leave Town is chock full of these double meanings, the album itself an experiment in dichotomy that moves gradually and uneasily away from the clear-cut lines of categorization—a box open or closed, a cat alive or dead—and towards the messy uncertainty of acceptance that sometimes, everything is just as true as everything else, and there is no real clarification or understanding to be reached. Take the recurring line “Love isn’t love enough,” which first crops up in “Beast Monster Thing” and finally makes a heartrending reprisal, all swelling instrumentation and bittersweet melancholia, in the concluding minutes of the album. There seems to be little consensus among Car Seat Headrest fans as to what, exactly, this line is. Is it “Love, isn’t love enough?”—a desperate question posed to a partner in the midst of an unraveling relationship, begging for their shared love to be enough to sustain them, or perhaps a wounded realization that, for the partner, it might not be? Is it the same question but not directed to anyone in particular, the first “love” a stylistic repetition of the word rather than a specific term of endearment? Or is it “Love isn’t love enough”—a numb, despondent statement proclaiming that not even love is “love” enough? If so, what does that mean? Is it that no single love is enough love to live on? Is it that love itself isn’t enough? Is it that the experience of love is always lackluster compared to the ideal of it? I’d argue it’s all of these and more, all at once. I’d argue that is kind of the point.

Toledo’s nine song record is simultaneously obsessed with the certainty of dichotomies and attempting to find peace in the murky unknown between Point A and Point B—which is, of course, a dichotomy in and of itself. It’s this fascinating battle between the natural instinct to understand and what Keats once called negative capability, the ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This back-and-forth is not unique to Toledo; rather, it’s just part and parcel of getting older. But that’s precisely why it’s so central in Car Seat Headrest’s discography: Toledo has previously described Car Seat Headrest “as a documentation of the process of growing up,” and for good reason. From his Bandcamp-only numbered albums to his most recent and most divisive release, Making a Door Less Open, the project itself follows Toledo as he moves from adolescence to adulthood, like a Linklater film split into 15-plus albums.

“I think there’s an idea that is never quite going to be reached, but there is room for play and peace within this lack of peace,” Toledo said to Observer in 2016, two years after How to Leave Town. “You’re able to be content with the idea that everything is going to change, and you’ll always be struggling with some future that’s not quite before your eyes yet. That’s just what life is, really.”

While Toledo might have grown more comfortable with applying negative capability to both literature and life by 2016, the speaker of How to Leave Town is just beginning to wrestle with it. The lyrics in the album frequently oscillate between complete certainty and its total opposite, especially in the context of dichotomies themselves. “I know the difference between what I want / And what I got,” Toledo sings with confidence on the second track, “Beast Monster Thing (Love Isn’t Love Enough)” then wholly undermines said confidence with the following lines: “‘Cause what I got is / [Mumbling].” Yes, “[Mumbling].” The sureness with which the previous dichotomous claim was stated evaporates entirely into walls of static-y guitar and distorted, grainy vocals, the words themselves incomprehensible. I’ve always loved this moment, because it’s such a perfect example of both Car Seat Headrest as a Boyhood-style, long-form depiction of the process of growing up, and of How to Leave Town’s specific placement within that timeline: Toledo, perhaps intentionally, perhaps without realizing, actually returns to this same dichotomy two years down the line, in “Fill in the Blank”—but with a newfound acceptance of his own lack of certainty. He sings: “It took me a long time / To figure out I don’t know what I want.” And it’s true; Toledo, or at least his Car Seat Headrest speaker persona, was just beginning to arrive at this realization in How to Leave Town, aware of it but perhaps not quite ready to accept it, letting waves of sound drown out the truth of his uncertainty as he slowly begins to force himself to make peace with it.

As evidenced by the mumbled second half of the line from “Beast Monster Thing” and the self-interruption seen in “America,” many of the central tensions of the record are at their most evident when Toledo is at his (purposefully) least eloquent. Toledo is all-too-aware of the ineffability of the feelings he’s trying to put into song, and similarly oscillates between attempting to find language and attempting to find a way to explain how hard it is to do so, both of which can feel like fruitless tasks. Frustration with language itself regularly takes the forefront, with a large portion of the masterful eight minute “I Want You To Know That I’m Awake/I Hope That You’re Asleep” dedicated to those precise concerns.

When Toledo sings that “it’s hard to say” whether or not he loves the song’s subject (and to what extent), that seems to be meant both figuratively and literally. The chorus, which directly succeeds that admission, is unable to finish its own sentences, with Toledo cutting himself off before he can complete the song’s titular lines. The following verses only expand on this, with the speaker repeatedly castigating himself for his inability to “find the right words” (“the final phrase of my last sentence / hangs in the air, sounding stupider and stupider”) and bemoaning how hard it is “to capture the feeling before it’s gone.” Then there’s the title of the atmospheric, devastating third track, “Kimochi Warui (When? When? When? When? When?),” which is named after a Japanese phrase from the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion that doesn’t have a direct translation into English at all. In fact, the spoken interlude partway through the song seems to be lifted directly from an Evangelion fansite that provides six possible English interpretations of the term: “I feel sick / I don’t feel well / What a disgusting feeling / I don’t like this feeling / How disgusting / This feeling sucks.” Even six attempts later, the feeling itself remains doomed to ineffability.

But even at Toledo’s most articulate, the messiness of those blurred dichotomies remain, particularly in regards to that unanswered question about the difference between what one is and what one can be. He declares in the opening track that “The way that you all see me / That’s who I am, but not who I need to be.” This is mirrored just a few songs later, in “Kimochi Warui,” when Toledo sings bluntly: “I am torn between / trying to be a better man / and trying to accept the man I am.” Ethereal harmonies kick in on that final line, almost choral in nature, sweeping the vulnerability of that admission into the stratosphere as the notes are sustained, the grandeur of the sound turned lingering and melancholic. “Kimochi Warui” is How to Leave Town at its most hopeless, evoking the sensation of standing alone in a desert, on a field, inside a planetarium, looking up at the sheer magnitude of everything around you and feeling just so very, very small. “I will not go to heaven / and I will not go to hell,” Toledo continues, with yet another dichotomy. “I have no faith in death / to be anything at all.” (The box is imagined opened, but there is no life or death within it. There’s nothing at all.)

This discrepancy in self is often partnered with the motif of heaven, which appears frequently throughout the record’s nine tracks and originally seems to represent something like that idea of a specific, idealized future and/or future self that Will described to Observer—the one “that is never quite going to be reached.” Prior to the depressing statement of resignation on “Kimochi Warui,” the speaker of “The Ending of Dramamine” repeatedly imagines a heaven in which everything will finally be as it should: “I know I’ll be ripped in heaven,” “Will there be a space / For my soul in space? / That’s heaven to me,” and the entire “breakdown” portion envisions a place “in the sky… / Where it’s warm, and you’re there,” where we “feel something besides pain.” Two songs later, though, that imagined heaven is shot through with hopelessness.

This sub-narrative finally comes to a head on “America (Never Been)”: Toledo states, “This is heaven, but heaven is here / This is heaven, but heaven is hard.” This line has stuck with me since I first heard it, perhaps in part because it’s reiterated to an almost eerily similar extent in another work of media that had a profound impact on my life: Jon Bois’s experimental multi-media narrative 17776, which imagines the world thousands of years into the future, after one day, everyone suddenly stopped dying. Time becomes infinite, which means it stops meaning anything at all. It all feels oddly like the eternal road trip the protagonist of How to Leave Town is forever undertaking within the confines of the album. At one point in 17776, a character says: “I kinda look at the big long life ahead of me that stretches out forever and disappears. And I get scared. And I think, ‘This can’t be Heaven if I’m getting scared, right?’ And then I think, ‘Maybe I am in Heaven, and Heaven is scary.’” Maybe this is heaven, and heaven is here. Maybe this is heaven, and heaven is scary. Maybe you open the box and find the life you already live staring back at you, and that’s all there is to it. Maybe growing up is just learning to make peace with that. And man, doesn’t that blow?

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that I, at least, spent a disconcerting amount of my adolescence feeling trapped in that same box, unable to tell what scared me more: living long enough to open it or never getting to see the truth inside at all? Opening it to discover that my future self is no different from my current one—that the version of myself I’ve wanted so badly to become was dead and doomed from the beginning—or opening it and discovering her alive and well only to realize that perhaps this wasn’t the answer all along and I still feel the same as I always have? This fear reared its ugly head especially in moments of transition, those stretched-out snapshots of breaths taken mid-leap—particularly in the lead-up to college, I got a little obsessed with the concept, borderline pathologically so. That admissions email is both an acceptance and a rejection until I open it (and if I never do, then I’ll always be accepted). The person I am doomed to become is both my ideal self and a convalescence of my worst fears, until I become her (and if I never do, I’ll never have to confront the person I couldn’t be, and the potential for self-actualization will always remain intact).

That period was also, fittingly, when I listened to Car Seat Headrest the most obsessively. I spent much of high school angsty and slouching down Florida public school hallways with Will Toledo’s whine caught in the tangled maze of my headphone cords. After all, there were very few artists that even approached that level of dread-filled, time-related self-loathing, that same constant fearful awareness of the interaction between past, present and future, that I found myself unerringly haunted by; it was a very specific strand of anxious misery. Whether or not Toledo himself was similarly haunted, I obviously have no idea—but I do know that his music lent itself unimaginably well to my own absorption in the concept, at least in my desperation to find some way to voice that bizarre, ineffable feeling.

Plagued or not, it’s obvious that Toledo himself has always been fascinated by time, by the notion of transposing the past into the present, of addressing the future from the past. More than any other band I can think of, Car Seat Headrest’s albums were made to be returned to. Toledo has practically made a career out of doing just that: just look at Teens of Style, at Twin Fantasy. Sure, it’s not unusual for bands to re-record their earlier works once they finally gain access to proper studio resources—but what is, arguably, more unique about Toledo’s case is that his decision to return to music he wrote as a 19-year-old was not so much the result of new opportunities cropping up than it was his intent from the very beginning.

A few years back, Car Seat Headrest fans stumbled upon a now virtually scrubbed 2015 Q&A that took place roughly seven months before Toledo was signed to Matador—seven months before he became, virtually, an overnight sensation (although, again, he had already released 11 albums on Bandcamp). Despite being unaware of the whirlwind of success waiting in the wings, Toledo spends much of the interview describing what “would come if we get signed,” specifically citing “a full album of re-recorded songs” (see: 2016’s Teens of Style) and even an entire “re-record[ing] of Twin Fantasy” (see: 2018’s Twin Fantasy [Face to Face]). It’s a little eerie to see just how much of his future Toledo had already envisioned back then, long before he stumbled upon the fame that enabled its materialization. But it’s not just that Toledo is an unparalleled forward thinker; rather, it might be more accurate to cite his tendency to look back. “I’ll hear lots of artists say they don’t even listen to their past albums, which kind of surprises me,” he told Northern Transmissions in 2015. This reaction is only natural, considering Toledo’s own mindset. As he said to Glen Sarvady in a Stomp and Stammer feature, “I’ve always been a fan of revisiting my older material—I’m usually going back and finding little stuff.” (As Sarvady editorializes: “How many 24 year-olds can talk about revisiting their ‘older material’ without sounding ridiculous?”)

The importance of revisiting old material is such a recurring theme for Toledo, both within his music and outside of it, that it sometimes feels like his primary audience might be his own future self. His songs are time capsules to be opened in some vague, unknowable future; journal entries addressed to “future mes and yous” (as he sings on Famous Prophets (Minds)). While albums always function as snapshots of moments in the lives of their creators, Toledo has always been more cognizant—or, at least, more eager to explicitly interrogate—that aspect of the medium than most. One particularly stark example comes at the very end of “Twin Fantasy (Those Boys)”, the final track of the 2018 Twin Fantasy rerelease, when he intones in a low, monotonous voice, spoken as if directly into the listener’s ear: “This is the end of the song, and it is just a song. This is a version of me and you that can exist outside of everything else. And if it is just a fantasy, then anything can happen from here. The contract is up, the names have been changed. So pour one out, whoever you are. These are only lyrics now.”

This 30-second sequence, followed by the haunting, bittersweet refrain of “When I come back, you’ll still be here” that echoes throughout the remainder of the song, never fails to give me chills. (Like, If I was approached on the street and told I’d get a million dollars if I could give myself goosebumps in under a minute, I’d whip out my AirPods, play this track, and start imagining the house I’d buy.) While those lines are, undoubtedly, talking about the relationship at the heart of Twin Fantasy, they also feel a little bit like a window into Toledo’s relationship with music itself. A song, an album, is reimagined into a Polaroid: produced in the heat of one specific instant as a means of crystallizing it, difficult to truly see or make sense of in the immediate aftermath, and only able to develop into a clear, holistic portrait through the passage of time alone. It’s a snapshot of one moment, and because of the act of taking a picture, of writing an album, that captured moment, while cursed to remain eternally stagnant in time, expands to contain an entire world. When you come back, whenever you’re ready to come back, it will still be there, unaltered, existing outside everything else. The person grinning at the lens will remain that way long after they storm out the door and leave your life. Your past self, now trapped in the four corners of the polaroid, will stay exactly as you left them.

“Hey, Space Cadet” is a gorgeous song, at once an encapsulation and a culmination of the entire record, at times feeling almost like that song at the end of a musical that weaves together every theme and leitmotif into one sonic tapestry. After that famous proclamation of “It’s 2014 and I have no idea what is going on in my life!” amid feedback-ridden distortion and pounding waves of sound, the song soon quiets into a soothing, if bittersweet, riff accompanied only by the light brush of a drum beat and Toledo’s plaintive “Hello, hello, hello, hello / I’m so excited to finally be here” (a callback to the much more upbeat opening of “You’re In Love With Me,” the album’s odd man out). After reminiscing on the twists and turns of his road trip, the focus then shifts to the titular “Space Cadet,” who, if consensus is to be believed, is widely seen as something of a stand-in for Toledo himself. It feels like a letter to a future self. To a past self. Somehow, to both at once. Toledo sings as if he stands in the future, looking back at the him of the present 2014 moment—which is also, in a way, a message to his own future self, imagining what he would say to the man he once was, the man Toledo still is.

Tempered affection and warmth war with bittersweet resignation in his voice, the emotionality of it only compounded by the surge of instrumentation beneath, as Toledo warns himself of the life to come: “You can’t hang out with your friends / Even when you are with them” (which harkens back to the “alive without living” theme) and “You’re gonna need a lot of love / But not the kind you’re thinking of” (which, while similar to “love isn’t love enough,” seems to take a slightly different tack: Perhaps love can be love enough, he just needs to seek it in different places). The song burns with sheer empathy even as it reaches ever-higher heights, pushing the Space Cadet to finally take off—to rip off the yoke of the box, that odd limbo he’s spent the past eight songs suspended within, and “show them what you can do.” But rather than fall back on similar tactics of lambasting and reproach, Toledo’s message to the Space Cadet is one of acceptance, not only of reality but his own discontentment at it: “It’s alright to want to dream / It doesn’t mean reality is mean.”

Although the entire EP is fascinating to look back on with the benefit of hindsight, there is no song that time has benefited quite as much as “Space Cadet,” which—knowing what we know now—leaps past mere hope and into something approximating manifestation. Toledo had no real reason to think How to Leave Town would garner a different response from any one of the ten albums he had released on Bandcamp prior, and yet there is a newfound calm certainty in his voice as he sings “Didn’t think it’d be this far / But that’s the price for being a star,” and nudges the subject towards showing the world “What can you do, man, what can you do?” Under a year later: Matador Records. But the song doesn’t have the tenor of a fantasy or even a prediction, nor the tell-tale steeliness of sheer determination. It’s calm and warm, building into a symphony that feels a little like peace—but only a little bit. After all, that lack of peace remains, just as it always has. The uncertainty of the future is as overwhelming as ever, the specter of a life poorly lived still looms overhead, the eternal frozen limbo still threatens to suffocate. Love still isn’t love enough (in fact, the leitmotif reappears in full, now surely intended as a statement instead of a question: “Love isn’t love enough / Love isn’t love even at all”). And yet—the song just soars. The Space Cadet does too. Perhaps he will finally find his place in the stars above. But that’s not for us to know.

This is the end of the EP, and it is just an EP. Anything can happen from here. These are only lyrics now.

But even so—when we come back, he’ll still be here.

This is, to me, what How to Leave Town encapsulates so uniquely: It’s a calcification of the split-second between reaching the box and opening it, stretched out like taffy into something approaching an eternity, and then finding meaning even in that seemingly helpless moment anyways. Equal parts listless and driven, defeatist and hopeful, paralyzed by uncertainty and determined to keep moving forward (even when “forward” is itself paralyzingly uncertain), How to Leave Town remains the pinnacle of “transition” records even a decade down the line, precisely because, like a Polaroid, the images within only grow clearer with every year that passes.

Read our 2023 profile on Car Seat Headrest here.